Monday I flew in from Omaha for my trip to SABCS 2025. Waking up at 3:30 in the morning is for the birds. I’m so grateful to the IBC Network Foundation for giving me the opportunity to attend again this year as a patient advocate. Three years in a row advocating for something I’m very passionate about, inflammatory breast cancer.
My arrival preceded the rest of the group representing The IBC Network Foundation. But it did allow me to participate in the inaugural SABCS Salutes Survivors event. There were exhibitors present, light snacks and a presentation. The presenters spoke on health and wellness during and after treatment.
“This special gathering will be held in conjunction with the annual Symposium and will focus on promoting long-term health and well-being to enhance quality of life by celebrating survivorship and providing educational resources.”
There was a small amount of downtime before the next event. I was extended an invitation to join the Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation for dinner with the Alamo Advocates at the Briscoe Western Museum. Dinner was delicious and there was a speaker presentation by Dr Brenda Ernst. A lot of emphasis on clinical trials and how can researchers get patients to participate in clinical trials. Are patients aware of clinical trials? Are doctors offering clinical trials? Are patients advocating for themselves and finding trials they can speak to their doctor about. Will there ever be a way to bring trials to patients in under represented areas?
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9TH
Still awaiting the arrival of my cohorts, I attended a morning special session. Special Session 2: Lobular Breast Cancer Updates. This session peaked my interest because of my own IBC diagnosis. It was IBC IDC with lobular features. The session had a lot of discussion, some of which I’m going to need to research a little more into. My takeaways here are that there has been a proposal to identify new architecture based variants of ILC. Lobular Breast cancers are harder to detect and there is a high risk of relapse, even with a low recurrence score. When matched by genomic risk, ILC and IDC have nearly identical outcomes. In ILC with neo-adjuvant therapy – there is similar and/or more benefit to anthrocycline based chemotherapy. Discussing strategies to prevent recurrence, a theory was proposed that hormone therapy (AI’s vs tamoxifen) are better. Future investigations will include more mixed subtype ILC/IDC, but there is a lot yet to define.
The afternoon session was an educational session titled “Dormancy & Reactivation of Breast Cancer Cells at Distant Metastatic Sites”. As an IBC patient, I hate to admit that this is always something that hovers at the edge of my thoughts. What triggers a dormant cell to activate itself? Thoughts are aging, stress, smoking, and possibly even chemo itself can promote metastatic outgrowth. Things that cause inflammation in the body. Even something that may only last a week or two, might trigger dormant cells to awaken. A study using a post-influenza mouse model showed an increase/awakening of dormant cells after 3 days. However, some disseminated tumor cells can survive >20 years before awakening.
Late afternoon and most of the group has arrived and we all met up in the atrium of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10TH
Today is the big day! A meeting of 11,000+ doctors, researchers and patient advocates all here for the sharing of ideas and research related to breast cancer. As a patient advocate, there is an advocate lounge just for us. A place to meet with members of our group as well as other patient advocates. Lunch is served here before the doors open to the Exhibit Hall. The Exhibit Hall is a lot! The Patient Advocate section is just a small fraction of the space. Major drug companies as well as smaller companies all occupy the space as well. The perimeter on two sides is where the poster sessions take place. Poster sessions are twice a day for an hour and a half each session. It is strongly advised that if you attend the conference, you download the SABCS mobile app well in advance (like as soon as it’s available) to peruse the poster session titles and accompanying abstracts that you may be interested in seeing. As an advocate for The IBC Network Foundation we try to divide and conquer, so to speak, so we can meet with poster presenters that The IBC Network Foundation itself has helped with the funding in their research. And when the day grows too long, you can pop over to the Wellness Lounge to snuggle with the therapy animals or get a short massage.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11TH
Exhibit Hall – day 2. Once again, our team met in the patient advocate lounge to plan our day. We did move to an area outside the lounge because it was entirely too loud to have a roundtable discussion. This pre-planning helps the day run a little smoother. My role this year was more “team mom”. On Wednesday, our ‘orientation’ day, I tried to make sure everyone in our group knew where things were located and how to find the places they wanted to be. On Thursday, I was delegated to draft a schedule of who should be where and when. This worked pretty well, there might be a few kinks to iron out yet in subsequent years. More poster sessions and general sessions were taken in. More networking with researchers and doctors. There are still way too many people who don’t understand what exactly inflammatory breast cancer is. We need to be talking about it more everywhere we go and to whomever will listen. As patient advocates, we are the voices of a lived experience.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12TH
Exhibit Hall – day 3. Today is the final day of the conference. The Exhibit Hall closes at 3 pm. The Patient Advocate area in the Exhibit Hall was not as busy this day. We had time to get together to discuss what things we enjoyed learning about at this year’s conference. We talked about what things we need to work on and how we can better help inflammatory breast cancer patients and researchers contributing to research in the IBC and Triple Negative areas. To unwind on Friday evening at the end of the convention, we upheld the annual tradition of dining at Mi Tierra. Some of the group broke off to return to the hotel after dinner and some of us did a little shopping in the market and finished the night with a RiverWalk cruise. It was a great experience overall with meeting new friends and reconnecting with friends I hadn’t seen for a while. Thank you SABCS and The IBC Network Foundation for another fantastic year.
